Designing SOCs with Configured Cores

14.7. High-Speed I/O for Processor-Based Function Blocks

The two bottlenecks in high-speed SOC block design are I/O performance and computational performance. The previous sections in this chapter have discussed improvements in a processor’s computational performance through TIE-based extensions. This section and following sections discuss the ways that TIE can be used to improve a processor’s I/O performance.

Every microprocessor core’s main bus represents a major I/O bottleneck. All data into and out of the processor must pass over this main bus. Consequently, two factors constrain I/O traffic in and out of the processor. First, a bus can only perform one transfer at a time so other pending transfers must wait for the current transfer to clear. ...